Pierre Labry

Paris, France. Commissaire Wens is put in charge of the investigation into the murder of one of six friends who, in the past, made a very profitable promise.

At the end of the 15th century, a man and a woman, posing as traveling minstrels, are sent by the Devil to a castle to seduce its inhabitants.

The adventurer Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, descendant (by the left hand) of the king of France Henri II, and who claims to be "Countess de la Motte", imagines a tortuous plan to steal a magnificent diamond necklace that the queen Marie-Antoinette refused to buy from the jewelers Boehmer and Bassange.

Jeannou lives in a castle in Périgord with his father, the last man of aristocratic lineage landowners, very attached to traditions. She meets Peter, a young engineer, she joined in Paris, decided to marry her. A few months later, pregnant, she returned to the area where the wedding will be celebrated.

In a college, three friends form a secret society. Their objective - going to America. One night, after one of their secret meetings, one of them sees a man coming out from a wall. The next day, after he talks about it, he disappears. Then, the second one vanishes. Are they gone to their dreams? That's when the art teacher is murdered. Suspicions now are too high so the third one decides to investigate.

An old woman living in an inn is killed and her family members seem like the likely culprits.

Paris, 1937. Winckler kills his enemy Gordon, a Chicago mobster, from the stage of a Parisian music hall, where he performs telepathy. He pays another artist, Helene, so that she tells the police they've spent the night together, which doesn't fool Callas, the police officer who investigates the murder. He hires one of his fellow officers in order to seduce Helene.

After a deadbeat patron at his restaurant gets special care from the cops who think the man has amnesia, the maitre d'hotel decides to pretend he too has amnesia. He is claimed in turn by an aristocrat family and by trapeze artists.

The young and patriotic student Demachy joins the French army in 1914 to defend his country. But he and his comrades soon experience the terrifying, endless trench war in Champagne, where more and more wooden crosses have to be erected for this cannon fodder.

The everyday life and activity of "La Dernière Heure", a major evening newspaper, seen through the eyes of Hélène Perrin, a cub reporter trained by Pierre Rabaud, a star in his field. Side by side they will investigate several events: an air show that ends tragically, the coming to France of a Hollywood actress, a lightship caught in a terrible storm...

At the beginning of World War I in a village in the country of La Marne, two families are against the marriage of their children. The war changes the positions.

A little town erupts in turmoil about the construction of a public urinal. The army is sent in to restore order, but the military add to the confusion by getting involved with the local women.

"L'Occident" presents a story of the reaction of East and West in contact. It is based on a novel of Henry Kistemaeckers, produced for the screen by M. Henri Fescourt. The story is of the love of Hassina, daughter of a Moroccan chief, and Lieutenant Cadière, who lands from his ship to get information for the fleet about the position of an army of rebel tribesmen.

Out of love for an actress, Isabelle, the Baron de Sigognac joins a traveling troop en route to Paris. When an actor dies, he takes over his role: that of Captain Fracasse.

The scene is set during the Second Empire. Captain Bitterlin watches jealously over his lovely daughter Madeleine but he cannot prevent nature from demanding its rights and Madeleine soon finds herself a suitor in the person of Mario, a dashing young songwriter. Bitterlin, who wishes his daughter to "evade the grip" of the young man, takes her away to Monte Carlo. There, the captain does what he had sworn he would never do, he gambles in a casino. And even more upsetting: Mario might well be hereabouts...

The struggles of a small business owner come to light in this film by director André Cayatte. The proprietor of a fabric shop, M. Baudu faces stiff competition when a department store moves in across the street, the first of its kind in 1860s Paris. On top of the stresses associated with the rival retailer, Baudu’s niece and two nephews take up residence with him after recently being orphaned. The niece, Denise Baudu, sees the writing on the wall for her uncle’s business so she takes a job as a shop girl with his competitor and despite her success the decision does not register well with the family.

Town trollop Safia, much against her better judgment, falls in love with Matteo, a beggar and mystic in the native quarter of Sirocco. She flees to France, first as the mistress and then wife of a wealthy archaeologist, and bears him Matteo's child, whom he believes to be his own. Complications arise years later when Matteo finds Safia, and a ring of blackmailers uncover her past and exposes her to her husband.

The turkey keeper, Bettina, brings good luck to those who make her work. She becomes the mascot of the good King Laurent XVII whose finances are in bad shape. In order for her to retain her beneficial power, an attempt is made to separate her from her lover, but in vain.

A religious fanatic finds his entire life and philosophy turned upside-down as he falls in love with a girl and kills her in a jealous rage. His search is for peace of mind and a desire to justify the murder of the girl to himself. His mind becomes distraught as he gropes trying to rationalize his deed and his world falls apart around him. A police inspector patiently and tirelessly stays on Barrault's trail, without putting him under arrest, though convinced he is the murderer, and waiting for the moment when he feels Barrault will break under the strain of his own religious fanaticism.

Guitry reprises his role as Pasteur which he played successfully at the Vaudeville Theatre in 1919.

The intersecting lives of neighbors in a courtyard apartment building in Vienna,including a football player related to the concierge,a new blonde maid hired by the wife of a baron,whom both the athlete and a baron flirt with,and a deadbeat tenant who fakes his suicide.

A famous convict Jacques Collin, alias Trompe la mort, or abbot Carlos Herrera, also called Vautrin, escapes from prison. Chance makes him meet Lucien de Rubempré, an impetuous and eternal lover who, when he is dismissed, collapses. Moved by this fragility, he takes him under his wing, and will do everything possible to ensure that his creature reaches happiness, even if it means imagining the worst shenanigans and other scams, with the help of a band of clever villains.

The film shows the seizure of power by the Nazis and Hitler wants a trial, at a time when France has just declared war on Germany (Sept. 3, 1939). Hybrid composition, it alternates originals and reconstructions performed by actors (docudrama). A not-so-subtle condemnation of Hitler, Nazism and Germany by the movie's French film makers, which conveniently makes no mention of how the policies of Great Britain and France created Hitler and allowed him to go as far as he did prior to the beginning of the Second World War.